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Comment by tdewitt | Hacker News Reader

You can have more than one problem. Think of it like a post mortem. Don't just look for root cause hut also think about mitigating factors. Solve for as many as possible.

Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.

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In 2014, 29 people were killed in an attack with knives (multiple attackers). In 1927, 38 children were killed in a school bombing in Michigan. There was a sarin gas attack in Japan that killed many. There are also numerous examples where many have been killed by fire.

It's naive and wrong to assume that there would be no mass killings without guns. There would likely be less, but it wouldn't be 0. Before anyone counters me with "we should prohibit all guns because it will prevent some mass killings", we still have 2nd amendment.

No but you can do so very easily with fire, a car or a trivial fertilizer bomb.

Then why don't they? It's just as easy, right? Just as effective, if not more so? You're making a supposition that the perpetrators would switch but in order for that to be considered in our post mortem, you need to provide evidence to support the argument

More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack as an example found in seconds.

> More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.

Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?

That's not how a post mortem works. You want to identify the root cause of an incident and any factors that increased the impact or prolong the incident. Solving for every possible scenario is how you end up solving for nothing. Playing the "what if?" game leads to an infinite set of potential problems and time, being finite, means you can never succeed

When we've solved for the current problem, we can address the next worst thing. We won't know what that is until it happens.

We could also solve for knife and sword attacks because there was that one time in Japan where someone murdered a bunch of kids or chainsaws because of that other one time that guy had a chainsaw but we do more by staying focused.

This isn't a service we can restart and try again on. Unlike software issues, you can't assign attacks into single-fault instances and go case-by-case. One attack does not indicate another, nor is it a template. We're dealing with a hydra, not a dragon - "fixing" one attack doesn't alter future ones just as preventing a single incidence of cancer doesn't fix cancer.

Historically bombings and arsons have always been a major problem, eg the Bath School Bombing. Car attacks are new-ish but rising. Shootings are an American phenomenon, but massacres are not.

We should not solve for shootings, we're just pouring the acid into a different jar. We should solve for massacres.

So if you can't solve for everything, you can't solve for anything? Gun massacres, in this country are on the rise. What else is and at what rate? You're arguing assumptions when we have facts and we can try to do something about facts.

You're right, we can't restart this service. These people are dead. They were shot. To death. We can never solve their problem but if we don't learn from it and try _something_ then we can't avoid the same thing from happening again. And again. And again. And again. (Repeat a few hundred times.)

But don't let me stop you. Solve for allthethings and let us know when you're done. In the meantime, a bunch of us are going to fight to solve for this current problem.

Do you remember the anime studio attack less than a month ago that killed more people than these last two killers put together? That was done with only a gas tank and lighter

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